Twain, Alcott, and the Birth of the Adolescent Reform Novel

Trites argues that Twain and Alcott wrote on similar topics because they were so deeply affected by the Civil War, by cataclysmic emotional and financial losses in their families, by their cultural immersion in the tenets of Protestant philosophy, and by sexual tensions that may have stimulated their interest in writing for adolescents, Trites demonstrates how the authors participated in a cultural dynamic that marked the changing nature of adolescence in America, provoking a literary sentiment that continues to inform young adult literature. Both intuited that the transitory nature of adolescence makes it ripe for expression about human potential for change and reform.

Cover

Frontmatter

Contents

Introduction

What do Caddie Woodlawn and Laura Ingalls and Holden Caulfield
and Ponyboy Curtis all have in common? Obviously, they are all adolescent
protagonists—and independent rebels who refuse to adhere
to social conventions. Furthermore, for the purposes of literary history,
their nonconformity can be read as a shared form of cultural critique in
that their rebelliousness results from negatively portrayed societal...

Abbreviations

1. Fantasy of Self-Reliance: An Introductory Biography

The central irony of the relationship between Samuel Clemens and Louisa
May Alcott lies not in the authors’ differences, but in their frequently
ignored similarities. Of specific interest are the social, economic, and
psychological factors that led both of them to use adolescence as a platform
from which to write about reform. With Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
and Little Women, these two authors...

2. The Metaphor of the Adolescent Reformer: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Little Women

The novels Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Little Women were published
seventeen years apart, which is almost a generation in terms of
the readership of the juvenile market. But they are two of the most studied
nineteenth-century American novels with adolescent protagonists.
Neither book has ever been out of print, and both of them are the most canonical
novel of their respective authors. The differences...

3. Historical Interlude: Vita Religiosa and Romantic Evangelism

Huck Finn and Jo March are the two most enduring adolescent figures in
the canon of American literature. But how did it happen that authors
such as Clemens and Alcott seized on the concept of adolescence as the
nexus of moral choice and reform? Before moving on to analyses of the
reformist adolescents that populate the rest of the Twain and Alcott canon, I
would like to explore...

4. Education and Reform: Victorian Progressivism in Youth Literature

Mark Twain and Louisa May Alcott demonstrate repeatedly their shared
belief that education is the most powerful tool for reform available to
the American public. Their belief was such a widely held ideology that
it was seldom questioned in the nineteenth century—or since. Henry
J. Perkinson identifies Americans’ faith in education as having its roots in both
Puritanism and the rationalist...

5. Gender and Reform: New Women and True Womanhood

Alcott’s efforts to reconcile coeducation, careers, and choices about marriage
in her novels Little Men and Jo’s Boys reflect one of the central debates
of postbellum America about the role of what would eventually be called
the “New Woman.”1 The debate would also engage Twain, especially later
in his career. Emerging as a result of the suffrage movement, the New Woman
was the antithesis of the woman immersed...

6. Historical Interlude: Authors, Authority, and Publication

Examining Samuel Clemens’s and Louisa May Alcott’s publication status
provides another angle from which to examine the history of children’s
and adolescent literature in the United States. Comparing the two not
only demonstrates an arena in which they shared similar experiences—
publishing—but it also provides a sense of what authors who were publishing...

7. Adolescent Reform Novels: The Legacy of Twain and Alcott

Up to this point, I have discussed novels that might easily be identified
as adolescent reform novels. Novels that admit the possibility of reform
tend to have hopeful ideologies. Many of Alcott’s and Twain’s novels
for youth imply that social change is possible: Eight Cousins, Rose in
Bloom, and The Prince and the Pauper are the most notable examples. The legacies
of these novels are a body of literature...

Afterword

Two forces propelled me to undertake this project: my concern that critics
of youth literature spuriously separate Mark Twain’s and Louisa May
Alcott’s writings as existing in the separate spheres of boys’ and girls’ stories,
and my belief that the history of ideas influenced the two authors
in similar ways that are still being rehearsed in twenty-first-century adolescent
literature. In 1995, when I first taught a seminar...

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